Month: May 2017

“You expect me to speak to the Archbishop? Your ideas are somewhat radical Father. For you to get on in your career you need to know how to play the game.”

“Radical? I don’t see it that way Your Grace. I think we could do a lot of good. We would build bridges. We could now bring together two sides once and for all. We need to do this, not just with our religions but with them all! But we can start with what we know.”

A match flares. A moment later, an empty cigarette pack lands at Janey’s feet in the back seat. She stretches her arms and yawns. Her mother drums her fingers on the steering wheel and beeps the car horn. “Hurry up, Jack.” The Joe’s Blue Lounge sign creates an eerie glow inside the car, a rusted Ford sedan idling by the curb on Main Street about a block south of the square.

I always find her this one way, it seems: sitting on her bed, high on her knees yet hunched at the shoulders as she bends into her project of the day and fixes it with her hard, Catholic glare. She has been known to work up a sweat, just hunching and glaring. Peeking at her through the door-crack, I try to imagine what kind of exertion roasts her so from the inside out, but apparently, it is something not I nor the world can see.

Freddie Pepperlyn got the idea looking at a travelogue on TV, three men and one woman in an oversized dugout canoe on a small river aiming for the Amazon, the water around them burgeoning with flesh eaters of all kinds. All kinds. Crocks or ‘gators or caiman, or whatever they had down there that grew tails long as houses, and then the piranha like an army of friggin’ fire ants. Bet they could get her to screw all day, he thought, if they threatened to throw her over the side, and her big enough, proud enough, all woman right down to her goddamn toes. In a pair of beat-up and ragged denim shorts she had hips that caught onto his eyes like his own personal clamps, as if they had his name on them: Freddie’sstuff, they said. Her secrets were fingers away. Oh, he could smell her, the bends in her, the dips, the fade-a-ways to you-know-what.